As President Obama heads to the Arctic to discuss climate change, just mere weeks after approving Shell Oil’s bid to drill for oil in the treacherous Chukchi Sea, a very different group is sounding the alarm over the dangers of a warming climate. That group, surprisingly, is Wall Street bankers.

Citibank has released a new report showing that taking action now against the growing threat of climate change would save an astonishing $1.8 trillion by the year 2040. Conversely, the report says that if no action is taken, the economy will lose as much as $44 trillion during that same time period.

As Think Progress points out, the Citibank report takes into account the potential lost revenue from leaving resources in the ground — including 80% of coal reserves, half of the world’s gas reserves, and a third of global oil reserves — and still concludes that the global economy would see a net gain.

This report offers a very stark contrast to the typical talking point that we hear as to why we can’t take action on climate change — that action would simply cost too much. 

But this is not the first time that financial leaders have warned about the financial dangers of climate change.

Earlier this summer, a group of current and former Wall Street executives and former U.S. Treasury Secretaries warned that a 2 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures could result in property losses in the state of Florida totaling $23 billion by the middle of this century. On top of the economic losses from property being underwater, the Southeast would also begin to see an alarming rise in yearly deaths due to extreme heat, with some estimates putting the yearly death toll as high as 35,000 people a year.  Agricultural losses could be as high as 20% of current yield.

If Wall Street understands the threat of climate change, even if only in terms of dollars, then this begs the question as to why they continue to fund climate change denying politicians.

Since 2014, Wall Street banks, real estate firms, and insurance companies — all industries that have expressed enormous concern over the financial threat of climate change — have poured an astonishing $507 million into political campaigns and lobbying activities.  62% of this money went to Republicans.

The reason that Party split is significant is because we have more climate change-denying members of the House and Senate then at any other point in time, and nearly every single one of them are members of the Republican Party.  According to an analysis by Think Progress, 53% of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives deny that climate change is real, and 70% of Republicans in the Senate refuse to admit that climate change is real.

If they want to be taken seriously, and if they want their financial concerns addressed by politicians, then Wall Street bankers need to immediately stop the flow of corporate campaign cash that is going to climate change deniers. As long as those people hold seats of power in Washington, D.C., then we will continue to see action stalled year after year.

Image source – Huffington Post UK.

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By focusing on fossil fuels, Canada is missing a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on clean energy technology, according to a new report from the Pembina Institute.

Through both a review of recent literature and one-on-one interviews with 21 of the country’s “clean energy leaders,” the report, entitled Competing in Clean Energy: Capitalizing on Canadian innovation in a $3 trillion economy, exposes the financial cost of the federal government’s overwhelming emphasis on the short-term profits provided by oil, gas and shale.

Interviewees include Nick Parker of Cleantech Group, who admits he finds it “difficult to not be acerbic or negative when it comes to how Canada ranks in the clean energy race.”

What are we missing?

As world leaders move to make the changes necessary to comply with the Copenhagen Accord which aims to limit global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius, they are increasingly looking for options to cut down on carbon emissions and move to renewable energy sources.

“Yet much of the focus of leaders in government and business has been on Canada’s abundance of raw fossil fuel commodities — from oilsands to shale gas and coal — and the opportunity to generate prosperity by exporting these resources.”

Thus far, the Canadian government has favoured a “go slow” approach to energy innovation, “betting on a slower emergence of a low-carbon economy, and a reluctance to impose additional costs on domestic industries and consumers to address a global problem [climate change].”

This has left us behind in the lucrative field of energy innovation. Although Canada is one of the top research and energy development funders in the world, our rate of funding as a percentage of GDP is presently less that the peak in 1984. Furthermore, poor coordination and short-sited funding have left us in fifth place in terms of clean energy inventions behind Korea, Germany, Japan and the United States. 

The report shows that aiding in the global transition toward clean energy is not only a moral imperative, but also a potential windfall for Canadian businesses, as well as an excellent way to create new jobs for Canadian workers. 

“With more than 700 companies, the cleantech sector has emerged as a major driver of innovation and employment growth in Canada, investing almost $2 billion in research and development and seeing an 11 per cent increase in employment between 2008 and 2010. Yet Canada currently captures just one per cent of the $1 trillion global clean technology industry. It is estimated that, as this industry grows to a projected $3 trillion by 2020, Canadian clean technology companies have the potential to increase their market share from today’s $9 billion to $60 billion.”

What can we do?

The report outlines three opportunities for the Canadian government to encourage growth in the clean energy entrepreneurship:

• Improve access to capital to keep emerging companies from falling into financial “valleys of death” before they are able to bring their new technologies to market. Chief Environment Officer of TD Bank Karen Clarke-Whistler provides advice on what the government could do to make banks more “comfortable” with supplying much needed financial resources to clean energy companies which tend to be high risk and have high capital needs.

• Create a national energy strategy that would focus hitherto poorly distributed funds. Many interviewees, including Tom Heintzman, co-founder and CEO of Bullfrog Power, suggest using fossil fuel resources to fund clean energy research, thus aiding in the smooth transition to sustainable technology.

• End preferential tax treatment for fossil fuel production and begin to figure the real cost of greenhouse gas pollution into the price of carbon-based energy. Dawn Farrell, CEO of TransAlta, encourages us to see the atmosphere that takes up CO2 emissions as a scarce resource and then price that resource to encourage more efficient use.

It concludes that if the federal government can go the way of some provincial governments and shift its focus away from the development and sale of fossil fuels, this country is, “well positioned to compete in the field of clean energy technology, creating jobs and economic prosperity across the country.”

Image Credit: Green Energy Futures on flickr.

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